To allay that fear, a large part of the aglet protocol is devoted to security.

ECONOMIST: Computer viruses need not be all bad

The result is that letting someone else's aglet on to your computer should be about as risky as downloading an applet from the Net, which is generally considered safe.

ECONOMIST: Computer viruses need not be all bad

Three layers of checks must be passed before an aglet is allowed access to a computer, and one of these layers can be customised for example to reject aglets whose owners do not have subscriptions to a commercial database.

ECONOMIST: Computer viruses need not be all bad